17 years ago
This entry starts out with a brief synopsis of my
current volunteer efforts and thoughts on transportation issues affecting me and
other Seattle residents. It then jumps back 17 years (almost exactly) to a
point in time when I was high above the Amazon Jungle and observed something
which at that time had not been observed by very many humans - I know because I
could find no one at that time who could explain what I saw. In the interim
between then and now the phenomenon I witnessed has been all the rage in
atmospheric and geophysics circles. New photos at the end are merely the usual
stunning sunsets which, now that I'm home again, I can continue to capture -
plus an observation about my old house in the District. Many new movies on multimedia page,
also.
Okay, the world hasn't returned to normal yet,
but I'm hopeful. Monorail opponents were successful here in Seattle in getting
enough signatures to place an initiative on the ballot this November, I-83,
which - if passed - would make it illegal to develop a monorail using city
rights-of-way. I'm hopeful that the citizens of Seattle will take this, their
fourth, opportunity to join the rest of the 21st Century world and defeat this
initiative and allow the Seattle Monorail Project to proceed. If the initiative
passes there's still hope since it seems to violate at least three State of
Washington legislative canons - the one which says only municipalities can pass
land-use regulations; the one which stipulates that growth must be managed; and
the one which says that legislation cannot be enabled through the initiative
process. We'll see.
Thinking that my volunteer efforts with monorail were coming to a close, I recently volunteered to help city council member Richard Conlin, who is chairman of the Council's Transportation Committee, along with quite a number of other citizens. Conlin has us working to identify the ways and means whereby Seattle can be a more bicycle-friendly city. The volunteers were separated into groups representing six quadrants of Seattle - NW, NE, W, E, SW, and SE. They correspond reasonably well with the dozens of city neighborhoods. I was pleased to see that the contingent from West Seattle, of which I am a member, was among the largest groups at the meeting. The eight or so of us from West Seattle and its environs have been busy little beavers in the past few weeks. We've identified safety problems on existing trails and designated streets. We identified and photographed and produced maps which show suggested bicycle lanes or improved access to the many bridges which are in the path from West Seattle to the other sections of town. We have an interim meeting of just our group next week where we'll compare notes, assemble our digital photos and prepare what is going to be a set of "professional" recommendations to the Seattle Transportation Department, via Council member Conlin. For his part, Conlin will present the recommendations from all six groups to his fellow council members, who he expects to act with new legislation for some of the recommendations. He also expects SDOT to implement some of the recommendations in their street manual, which is under revision presently.
I don't think I deliberately set out to volunteer for only transportation issues but that's what it seems I've done. Transportation, though, is clearly the one area where Seattle lags nearly every other similarly-sized city in both the country and on the continent. We are the only city of consequence on the West Coast to NOT have rapid urban transportation. Yes, King County Metro operates an exemplary bus system. But, it's stuck in the at-grade traffic along with every truck, SUV, passenger car and motorcycle in the county and even worse here in the city. If we're lucky enough to proceed with no more political wrangling and business-financed recall issues, this town will have two, and possibly three, new transit systems in operation by 2007. The Seattle Monorail Project will connect the western (Sound-side) neighborhoods of the city with downtown, the stadiums, Seattle Center, the International District and Pioneer Square; Sound Transit's Link Light Rail will connect the southeast (Lake Washington-side) neighborhoods with Beacon Hill, the stadiums, the International District, Pioneer Square, downtown and soon afterwards Capitol Hill and the U-District; and, the potential third new system would be a streetcar line which follows the lower Lake Union landscape and intercepts back with downtown. There's even talk of extending the existing Waterfront Streetcar line to follow Yesler Way up into the International District.
Hopeful, I am, that all these will reach fruition and the residents of Seattle and its environs will have the world-class public transportation system we need and deserve. Oh, most of these are to be paid for with local money, only Sound Transit's Link Light Rail would receive Federal money. That's as it should be because way back in the early 1970's Seattle was offered a chance by the U.S. Department of Transportation to develop a subway system. The city said "no" and the money went to Atlanta instead. Now, Atlanta has two subway lines which link its downtown with the northern and eastern near suburbs and the airport and we have perpetual gridlock.
Now, for the matter of the subject line: 17 Years Ago. At that time, late September of 1987, I was returning from several months spent in Punta Arenas, Chile, as part of the team engaged in the Southern Ozone Expedition. We were trying to discover why there was a growing ozone hole over the Antarctic. On my flight back from Punta Arenas to Washington, DC, I boarded my Chilean Ladeca Airlines plane at Punta Arenas and changed to a (no longer with us) Pan American Airways flight from Santiago through Buenos Aires and on through Miami to National Airport in DC. This is the electronic submission I filed to a bulletin-board-system (BBS - remember them?) I was a member of when I returned home to DC. It is reprinted here exactly as it was transmitted to the BBS that October in 1987. The BBS was operated out of Reston, Virginia and was officially called "Monks Board", named after Terry Monks, the individual who ran it, but because of the limitations of the then-available BBS software, it was known as "Monksboa" because that's the eight-letters which the BBS software showed in the entry forms. The story you are about to read is true and since that time we've learned a lot about the phenomenon I describe - sprites and jets. For more information on these two "electric" atmospheric features, see either of the following URLs - <http://umbra.nascom.nasa.gov/spd/sprites.html> or <http://elf.gi.alaska.edu/>.
And now, step into the "Wayback Machine" and join me aboard the Pan American World Airways 747 high above the Amazon Jungle:
(current "Wayback Machine" is a web archive; as we all know, the original "Wayback Machine" was Peabody and Sherman's time-travel contraption from the Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle Show).
Posting Date:10/5/87 1:28 am
Over the Amazon Jungle at 2:00 am EDT on September 28, 1987
The PanAm 747 is quiet. The forty-some-odd passengers are all spread out on a variety of three-by and four-by seats. Each passenger has a complete lounge-bed to him/herself. In fact the airplane is so empty that there are dozens of empty lounge- sleeper seat combinations still empty. Both sides of the plane have a good selection. The flight crew is all but asleep themselves. What is going on behind the cockpit door I can't say, but in the main cabins all but one of the flight attendants is taking a nap.
The lonely awake flight attendant is making tea for himself and gets some coffee for me, checking first to see that the pot is still warm. The cabin lights have long been dimmed. I mean really dimmed. There are really only emergency "exit" lights lit and one light over the rear lavatory vestibule and one at the middle galley and one forward at the forward lavatories. The rest of the plane is extremely dark and really quite comforting.
The steady drone of the four huge turbofans and the rush of the air outside the cabin produces a very "womblike" atmosphere and the passengers give no indication of stirring. They are all no doubt as tired of travelling as me and quite thankful to have a couch to sleep on.
I had been fitfully sleeping. Fitfully only because I had wanted to see the Amazon jungle and knew earlier that both coming and going I would by flying this leg in the dark. I was unhappy about missing something as important as this huge jungle and all the various tributaries of the river
We had flown into Buenos Aires just as the sun was setting and I was able to see the city from the air once more. Going south we had passed through BA (as it is affectionately called) in the middle of the afternoon and I had gotten to see a good deal of the layout of the city and its harbor on the Rio Plata. I had known from readings and from talking to various individuals that BA was not only known as the Paris of South America, but in fact WAS the Paris of South America. It had certainly looked that way from the air. There were great expanses of neighborhoods separated by huge clusters of office and shopping buildings all lined up on wide and scenicly attractive boulevards which seemed to go on for dozens of miles in all sorts of odd angles to each other.
Anyway, BA was behind me now. It was quite a treat to see it at night after the takeoff and to see the stark darkness of the Plata River and the dotted countryside of Uruguay light up as we flew north. We were well north of all that now. Deep inside Brazil - and in fact deep inside the ecological confines of the Amazon River Basin - the PanAm Santiago-BA-Miami flight presses against the cold 38,000 foot air.
After scrounging throughout the cabin for a variety of items to read including both Sunday BA papers, I settle back into my 49 H- I-J lounge and pull out my pocket Mini Maglite. I use the tiny flashlight for two reasons. The first is because the overhead cabin lights in my section don't work, not that they are turned off but that they flat don't work. The other reason is that had I used the overhead I would have disrupted the tranquility and womb-ness of the aircraft's interior.
I zip through the papers. I can't speak Spanish fluently and can barely understand the spoken tongue but I can read it with some level of comprehension and enjoy the papers and their features and business sections. While I'm doing this I keep noticing some very brilliant flashes of light out my window but figure it to be the strobe lights on the wings. After finishing the reading material I look out the window and try and find the strobes. I can't. There are no strobes which are working - perhaps the pilot turns them off on certain routes or perhaps they only turn them on when landing. Anyway I press my head against the window and look overhead at the stars. We're still south of the Equator and the Southern Sky is still very much evident because there are unfamiliar constellations and familiar ones in a state of seeming disarray.
I also notice a very faint glow which I immediately perceive to be right where the outboard starboard engine would be on the wing. Ah, ha! I can see the emerging hot gasses as they would be slightly ionized and visible in a supremely dark setting. Well, the dark setting we certainly have so I attune my eyes to the even fainter light outside and after a short while am amazed that I am actually looking at the jet exhaust from the engine. It is shaped exactly like the familiar exhaust pictures I have seen of jet fighter airplanes.
I continue to admire this minor added visual plus and try and record in my mind the subtlety of the colors. The inside cone is a pale sky blue and the outside cone is a pale evening sky blue. When I say pale I really mean pale. It is discernible against the midnight-black of the Amazon high-altitude backdrop but it is "barely" discernible and anyone with any vision problems would probably not see it at all.
After this pleasant and really surprising diversion, I turn my attention once again to trying to figure out where this flashing light is coming from. I look at the ground, at the sky, at the wings and from the wings and the engine covers I realize that the flashes are coming from the other - West - side of the plane. There is no restriction against my free movement, the ride is not only jet-smooth, it is lulling. Because of this I can roam at will and do so looking for the best, free, vantage point on the other side of the cabin. I settle for the set of two seats at the very rear of the port side and seat myself.
After my first look out the window I immediately know what the flashes are: they are the lightning flashes coming from an enormous thunderstorm immediately west of us. I judge the line of thunder-bumper clouds to be about 60 to 70 miles from us with the tops of the bigger storm clouds rising to at least 60 if not 80 thousand feet. We are flying at 38,000 and are at about the midpoint for most of the cloud structure. There is a lot of lightning activity. Some of the activity is cloud-to-cloud. Some of it is cloud-to-ground or ground-to-cloud and some of it seems to just happen. The bolts range from regular huge to superbolt.
Having seen lots of lightning storms and having seen some of them in the presence of lightning experts I feel qualified to class the bolts as "super" or ordinary huge. At any rate the colors range from brilliant, strobe-like, white to yellow to a searing red. I can't quite tell what the red bolts are suggesting but they clearly look like angry cinders heaved about by some viscious gods having a war. The scene covers the entire line of my vision from left-rear to left-forward. The 747 is in essence flying up the line of lightning activity and when we get abreast of one of the 80,000 thunder-bumper clouds the underbelly of the 747 shakes slightly as if to acknowledge the immensity of the storm and its own vulnerableness. Indeed, I think, what if one of those bolts were to strike the wing or an engine. Actually I was hoping that one of the bolts would strike a wing or the engine.
On a previous flight through Atlanta to Houston the plane I was on was diverted for about an hour while a thunderstorm of not- quite-equal magnitude raged over the Atlanta airport. During the diversionary flying which ensued the pilot of this other airplane had flown completely around one of the 60-or-so-thousand-foot- high storm clouds and treated us all to a stunning display of cloud-to-cloud lightning. At the point where he was given permission to resume landing preparations for Harstfield airport, the pilot of this other plane went perhaps too close to the cloud he had been circling and a bolt went from the wing to somewhere inside the cloud. It was just my great luck that it happened on my side of the airplane and I happened to be looking out the window at exactly that moment. It wasn't so much as a bolt of lightning as a blinding flash of strobe-white light followed by a residual bright yellow-to-orange thread leaving the wing. Wow, my mind raced realizing that I had never had lightning strike so close to me before. Even though I had seen three lightning strikes in person before, the closest previous one had been about 100 feet and this one was quite obviously less than twenty feet. Nothing seemed to happen to the airplane, though.
So back onboard the 747 I was expectant that one of the Amazon lightning bolts might find its way to the left wing just for my pleasure. We were, to be sure, quite outside the stormy wind patterns and probably rather far from the electric field activity and therefore probably at the zero percent probability level for lightning striking the wing, but what the heck, I hoped for it anyway.
I spend a great deal of attention to trying to deduce the next lightning strike location. I have watched thunderstorms from the air before and from high places in Washington and from low places in Houston. Lightning is not that well understood. Sure, we know what it is and why it does its thing but we can't predict where it will strike next even though we can tell if the conditions are ripe for a strike. There have been suggestions of synchronicity and rhythm and I am looking for just these details as I peer out the rear window.
The window itself is cold and my breath causes a slight fogging so I have to adopt a controlled breathing technique and that causes a certain Zen mentality to settle down inside me. I am really quite satisfied. The intimate atmosphere of the cabin coupled with the steamy violence outside and the continuing rushing wind and whirring engine noise all combine to give me a clarity of perception which is rarely achieved on the ground. At least rarely by me.
After a while, probably on the order of twenty minutes, I begin to sense the synchronicity at work and begin to imagine where the next regular and then superbolt will come. The frequency of the superbolts is tied to the number and location of the regular bolts and they in turn are tied to the location of the last red cloud-to-cloud bolt and the actual height of the cloud. It is all beginning to make a crude sort of sense and I am at a level of satisfaction and comprehension which gives way to a hunger for more when I get it. From the top of the highest cloud in the storm, at nearly a perfect 90 degree angle from the line of flight of the plane and therefore directly in front of me, I see the event which I have been waiting for and which I cannot explain from learning or experience.
What I see is a corona discharge which goes from the top of the 80,000-foot-cloud in a straight line to what I gather to be some ionized layer of the stratosphere where it fans out in a perfect 45 degree fan. There are no jagged edges to any of this, no curved or jagged lines. No sirree. This event is composed of absolutely perfect straight lines and reproduceable angles. It is all the more electrifying because only about an hour earlier I had been intensely studying the exhaust of the engine on the other side and was totally attuned to the faint colors and subtle shades of blue and purple which identify ionized gasses.
With the hair on my neck standing on end, I press even closer to the window hoping for a repeat. After waiting for a few minutes and trying to recover from my memory what the lightning conditions were like when this discharge occurred, I get my second chance. There, just to the north of the really big cloud is a slightly smaller cloud, topping out at perhaps only 60,000 feet. From just below the top of this smaller cloud comes another straight-line discharge culminating in a slightly smaller fanning discharge in the stratosphere. The length of the fan is shorter than before and the intensity of the discharge is slightly paler but otherwise it's the same event.
Absolutely stupified I fall back into the chair and look out the window from a more normal perspective. I'm trying to remember everything I know about lightning and lightning research to find evidence that what I have just seen is real and has a solid explanation. I cannot recall a thing about this coronal discharge event or even of anyone who ever mentioned that such things could and did occur. I am aware that coronal discharges during a lightning storm are fairly common on the ground and that following a really close lightning strike, a coronal discharge can happen in the immediate vicinity of where the bolt struck on the ground. In fact, my Mom has a television set which was fried by such a coronal discharge. But in the sky?
I continue to gaze out the window and continue to be amazed. The 747 is now adjacent to the northernmost line of storm clouds to the west and most of the storm activity is clearly behind me. I look forward and can see there are some lights of towns and some appear to be city size so I return to my own seat to settle in for another nap.
When I get back to my seat I see that the storm has either struck up on the starboard side or the plane has been flying a subtle westerly course and the storm is, in fact, behind us now. At any rate I look down and get a chance to see some really pretty electrified cities and towns and spend the next twenty or so minutes pondering what I have just witnessed. Again, trying desparately to remember the pale colors and to be able to exactly describe and draw what I have seen. The stars continue to shine brightly outside the window but I detect an approaching coastline in front of us.
We cross the threshold of land-to-water and I figure I can get a couple hours sleep before we land in Miami. It's now about 4:00 am and we are scheduled to land at 6:30 am. I spread out comfortably on the three seats which are my in-flight bed and drift again into the realm of dreams and visions still stunned and amazed but deeply satisfied at what I have discovered.
thanks for your patience and perserverance. chas
More new items and potential reveries from the past coming soon. For image fans, I've posted some new shots from Seattle below, and, for movie fans I've posted a couple new T&M flicks on the multimedia site <http://homepage.mac.com/credmond/multimedia.html>.
More, as always, later
Chas
The setting sun illuminates the upper reaches of Mt. Rainier as the moon rises.
Image taken from tower looking southeast.
Looking west as the sun recedes behind clouds with the Olympic Mountains dramatically back-lighted.
Taken from tower within seconds of the previous Mt. Rainier image.
The same scene several minutes later. Ferry landing lights and the lights from a tower across the Sound
on the Kitsap peninsula are visible. Taken from the tower.
Current advertisement from Washington Post print edition.
Katherine and I originally purchased this house in 1980
for $110,000. In 2002, after two Metro Red Line stations
(Tenleytown & Friendship Heights) within half-a-mile of us
had been open and operating for about a decade, we
sold the house to Juan Del Real for $411,000. After, as
he puts it, "gutting" and "rebuilding", Juan is selling the
house for $799,000. We estimated he spent about $100K
on the gutting and rebuilding but did keep the original look
of the house - see below.
Ah, the old homestead....................Ah, the new homestead...................I think we made out okay.
And that's today's journal entry. Have a nice weekend, what's left of it, more images from the trip coming as well as more movies.
Chas
Thinking that my volunteer efforts with monorail were coming to a close, I recently volunteered to help city council member Richard Conlin, who is chairman of the Council's Transportation Committee, along with quite a number of other citizens. Conlin has us working to identify the ways and means whereby Seattle can be a more bicycle-friendly city. The volunteers were separated into groups representing six quadrants of Seattle - NW, NE, W, E, SW, and SE. They correspond reasonably well with the dozens of city neighborhoods. I was pleased to see that the contingent from West Seattle, of which I am a member, was among the largest groups at the meeting. The eight or so of us from West Seattle and its environs have been busy little beavers in the past few weeks. We've identified safety problems on existing trails and designated streets. We identified and photographed and produced maps which show suggested bicycle lanes or improved access to the many bridges which are in the path from West Seattle to the other sections of town. We have an interim meeting of just our group next week where we'll compare notes, assemble our digital photos and prepare what is going to be a set of "professional" recommendations to the Seattle Transportation Department, via Council member Conlin. For his part, Conlin will present the recommendations from all six groups to his fellow council members, who he expects to act with new legislation for some of the recommendations. He also expects SDOT to implement some of the recommendations in their street manual, which is under revision presently.
I don't think I deliberately set out to volunteer for only transportation issues but that's what it seems I've done. Transportation, though, is clearly the one area where Seattle lags nearly every other similarly-sized city in both the country and on the continent. We are the only city of consequence on the West Coast to NOT have rapid urban transportation. Yes, King County Metro operates an exemplary bus system. But, it's stuck in the at-grade traffic along with every truck, SUV, passenger car and motorcycle in the county and even worse here in the city. If we're lucky enough to proceed with no more political wrangling and business-financed recall issues, this town will have two, and possibly three, new transit systems in operation by 2007. The Seattle Monorail Project will connect the western (Sound-side) neighborhoods of the city with downtown, the stadiums, Seattle Center, the International District and Pioneer Square; Sound Transit's Link Light Rail will connect the southeast (Lake Washington-side) neighborhoods with Beacon Hill, the stadiums, the International District, Pioneer Square, downtown and soon afterwards Capitol Hill and the U-District; and, the potential third new system would be a streetcar line which follows the lower Lake Union landscape and intercepts back with downtown. There's even talk of extending the existing Waterfront Streetcar line to follow Yesler Way up into the International District.
Hopeful, I am, that all these will reach fruition and the residents of Seattle and its environs will have the world-class public transportation system we need and deserve. Oh, most of these are to be paid for with local money, only Sound Transit's Link Light Rail would receive Federal money. That's as it should be because way back in the early 1970's Seattle was offered a chance by the U.S. Department of Transportation to develop a subway system. The city said "no" and the money went to Atlanta instead. Now, Atlanta has two subway lines which link its downtown with the northern and eastern near suburbs and the airport and we have perpetual gridlock.
Now, for the matter of the subject line: 17 Years Ago. At that time, late September of 1987, I was returning from several months spent in Punta Arenas, Chile, as part of the team engaged in the Southern Ozone Expedition. We were trying to discover why there was a growing ozone hole over the Antarctic. On my flight back from Punta Arenas to Washington, DC, I boarded my Chilean Ladeca Airlines plane at Punta Arenas and changed to a (no longer with us) Pan American Airways flight from Santiago through Buenos Aires and on through Miami to National Airport in DC. This is the electronic submission I filed to a bulletin-board-system (BBS - remember them?) I was a member of when I returned home to DC. It is reprinted here exactly as it was transmitted to the BBS that October in 1987. The BBS was operated out of Reston, Virginia and was officially called "Monks Board", named after Terry Monks, the individual who ran it, but because of the limitations of the then-available BBS software, it was known as "Monksboa" because that's the eight-letters which the BBS software showed in the entry forms. The story you are about to read is true and since that time we've learned a lot about the phenomenon I describe - sprites and jets. For more information on these two "electric" atmospheric features, see either of the following URLs - <http://umbra.nascom.nasa.gov/spd/sprites.html> or <http://elf.gi.alaska.edu/>.
And now, step into the "Wayback Machine" and join me aboard the Pan American World Airways 747 high above the Amazon Jungle:
(current "Wayback Machine" is a web archive; as we all know, the original "Wayback Machine" was Peabody and Sherman's time-travel contraption from the Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle Show).
Posting Date:10/5/87 1:28 am
Over the Amazon Jungle at 2:00 am EDT on September 28, 1987
The PanAm 747 is quiet. The forty-some-odd passengers are all spread out on a variety of three-by and four-by seats. Each passenger has a complete lounge-bed to him/herself. In fact the airplane is so empty that there are dozens of empty lounge- sleeper seat combinations still empty. Both sides of the plane have a good selection. The flight crew is all but asleep themselves. What is going on behind the cockpit door I can't say, but in the main cabins all but one of the flight attendants is taking a nap.
The lonely awake flight attendant is making tea for himself and gets some coffee for me, checking first to see that the pot is still warm. The cabin lights have long been dimmed. I mean really dimmed. There are really only emergency "exit" lights lit and one light over the rear lavatory vestibule and one at the middle galley and one forward at the forward lavatories. The rest of the plane is extremely dark and really quite comforting.
The steady drone of the four huge turbofans and the rush of the air outside the cabin produces a very "womblike" atmosphere and the passengers give no indication of stirring. They are all no doubt as tired of travelling as me and quite thankful to have a couch to sleep on.
I had been fitfully sleeping. Fitfully only because I had wanted to see the Amazon jungle and knew earlier that both coming and going I would by flying this leg in the dark. I was unhappy about missing something as important as this huge jungle and all the various tributaries of the river
We had flown into Buenos Aires just as the sun was setting and I was able to see the city from the air once more. Going south we had passed through BA (as it is affectionately called) in the middle of the afternoon and I had gotten to see a good deal of the layout of the city and its harbor on the Rio Plata. I had known from readings and from talking to various individuals that BA was not only known as the Paris of South America, but in fact WAS the Paris of South America. It had certainly looked that way from the air. There were great expanses of neighborhoods separated by huge clusters of office and shopping buildings all lined up on wide and scenicly attractive boulevards which seemed to go on for dozens of miles in all sorts of odd angles to each other.
Anyway, BA was behind me now. It was quite a treat to see it at night after the takeoff and to see the stark darkness of the Plata River and the dotted countryside of Uruguay light up as we flew north. We were well north of all that now. Deep inside Brazil - and in fact deep inside the ecological confines of the Amazon River Basin - the PanAm Santiago-BA-Miami flight presses against the cold 38,000 foot air.
After scrounging throughout the cabin for a variety of items to read including both Sunday BA papers, I settle back into my 49 H- I-J lounge and pull out my pocket Mini Maglite. I use the tiny flashlight for two reasons. The first is because the overhead cabin lights in my section don't work, not that they are turned off but that they flat don't work. The other reason is that had I used the overhead I would have disrupted the tranquility and womb-ness of the aircraft's interior.
I zip through the papers. I can't speak Spanish fluently and can barely understand the spoken tongue but I can read it with some level of comprehension and enjoy the papers and their features and business sections. While I'm doing this I keep noticing some very brilliant flashes of light out my window but figure it to be the strobe lights on the wings. After finishing the reading material I look out the window and try and find the strobes. I can't. There are no strobes which are working - perhaps the pilot turns them off on certain routes or perhaps they only turn them on when landing. Anyway I press my head against the window and look overhead at the stars. We're still south of the Equator and the Southern Sky is still very much evident because there are unfamiliar constellations and familiar ones in a state of seeming disarray.
I also notice a very faint glow which I immediately perceive to be right where the outboard starboard engine would be on the wing. Ah, ha! I can see the emerging hot gasses as they would be slightly ionized and visible in a supremely dark setting. Well, the dark setting we certainly have so I attune my eyes to the even fainter light outside and after a short while am amazed that I am actually looking at the jet exhaust from the engine. It is shaped exactly like the familiar exhaust pictures I have seen of jet fighter airplanes.
I continue to admire this minor added visual plus and try and record in my mind the subtlety of the colors. The inside cone is a pale sky blue and the outside cone is a pale evening sky blue. When I say pale I really mean pale. It is discernible against the midnight-black of the Amazon high-altitude backdrop but it is "barely" discernible and anyone with any vision problems would probably not see it at all.
After this pleasant and really surprising diversion, I turn my attention once again to trying to figure out where this flashing light is coming from. I look at the ground, at the sky, at the wings and from the wings and the engine covers I realize that the flashes are coming from the other - West - side of the plane. There is no restriction against my free movement, the ride is not only jet-smooth, it is lulling. Because of this I can roam at will and do so looking for the best, free, vantage point on the other side of the cabin. I settle for the set of two seats at the very rear of the port side and seat myself.
After my first look out the window I immediately know what the flashes are: they are the lightning flashes coming from an enormous thunderstorm immediately west of us. I judge the line of thunder-bumper clouds to be about 60 to 70 miles from us with the tops of the bigger storm clouds rising to at least 60 if not 80 thousand feet. We are flying at 38,000 and are at about the midpoint for most of the cloud structure. There is a lot of lightning activity. Some of the activity is cloud-to-cloud. Some of it is cloud-to-ground or ground-to-cloud and some of it seems to just happen. The bolts range from regular huge to superbolt.
Having seen lots of lightning storms and having seen some of them in the presence of lightning experts I feel qualified to class the bolts as "super" or ordinary huge. At any rate the colors range from brilliant, strobe-like, white to yellow to a searing red. I can't quite tell what the red bolts are suggesting but they clearly look like angry cinders heaved about by some viscious gods having a war. The scene covers the entire line of my vision from left-rear to left-forward. The 747 is in essence flying up the line of lightning activity and when we get abreast of one of the 80,000 thunder-bumper clouds the underbelly of the 747 shakes slightly as if to acknowledge the immensity of the storm and its own vulnerableness. Indeed, I think, what if one of those bolts were to strike the wing or an engine. Actually I was hoping that one of the bolts would strike a wing or the engine.
On a previous flight through Atlanta to Houston the plane I was on was diverted for about an hour while a thunderstorm of not- quite-equal magnitude raged over the Atlanta airport. During the diversionary flying which ensued the pilot of this other airplane had flown completely around one of the 60-or-so-thousand-foot- high storm clouds and treated us all to a stunning display of cloud-to-cloud lightning. At the point where he was given permission to resume landing preparations for Harstfield airport, the pilot of this other plane went perhaps too close to the cloud he had been circling and a bolt went from the wing to somewhere inside the cloud. It was just my great luck that it happened on my side of the airplane and I happened to be looking out the window at exactly that moment. It wasn't so much as a bolt of lightning as a blinding flash of strobe-white light followed by a residual bright yellow-to-orange thread leaving the wing. Wow, my mind raced realizing that I had never had lightning strike so close to me before. Even though I had seen three lightning strikes in person before, the closest previous one had been about 100 feet and this one was quite obviously less than twenty feet. Nothing seemed to happen to the airplane, though.
So back onboard the 747 I was expectant that one of the Amazon lightning bolts might find its way to the left wing just for my pleasure. We were, to be sure, quite outside the stormy wind patterns and probably rather far from the electric field activity and therefore probably at the zero percent probability level for lightning striking the wing, but what the heck, I hoped for it anyway.
I spend a great deal of attention to trying to deduce the next lightning strike location. I have watched thunderstorms from the air before and from high places in Washington and from low places in Houston. Lightning is not that well understood. Sure, we know what it is and why it does its thing but we can't predict where it will strike next even though we can tell if the conditions are ripe for a strike. There have been suggestions of synchronicity and rhythm and I am looking for just these details as I peer out the rear window.
The window itself is cold and my breath causes a slight fogging so I have to adopt a controlled breathing technique and that causes a certain Zen mentality to settle down inside me. I am really quite satisfied. The intimate atmosphere of the cabin coupled with the steamy violence outside and the continuing rushing wind and whirring engine noise all combine to give me a clarity of perception which is rarely achieved on the ground. At least rarely by me.
After a while, probably on the order of twenty minutes, I begin to sense the synchronicity at work and begin to imagine where the next regular and then superbolt will come. The frequency of the superbolts is tied to the number and location of the regular bolts and they in turn are tied to the location of the last red cloud-to-cloud bolt and the actual height of the cloud. It is all beginning to make a crude sort of sense and I am at a level of satisfaction and comprehension which gives way to a hunger for more when I get it. From the top of the highest cloud in the storm, at nearly a perfect 90 degree angle from the line of flight of the plane and therefore directly in front of me, I see the event which I have been waiting for and which I cannot explain from learning or experience.
What I see is a corona discharge which goes from the top of the 80,000-foot-cloud in a straight line to what I gather to be some ionized layer of the stratosphere where it fans out in a perfect 45 degree fan. There are no jagged edges to any of this, no curved or jagged lines. No sirree. This event is composed of absolutely perfect straight lines and reproduceable angles. It is all the more electrifying because only about an hour earlier I had been intensely studying the exhaust of the engine on the other side and was totally attuned to the faint colors and subtle shades of blue and purple which identify ionized gasses.
With the hair on my neck standing on end, I press even closer to the window hoping for a repeat. After waiting for a few minutes and trying to recover from my memory what the lightning conditions were like when this discharge occurred, I get my second chance. There, just to the north of the really big cloud is a slightly smaller cloud, topping out at perhaps only 60,000 feet. From just below the top of this smaller cloud comes another straight-line discharge culminating in a slightly smaller fanning discharge in the stratosphere. The length of the fan is shorter than before and the intensity of the discharge is slightly paler but otherwise it's the same event.
Absolutely stupified I fall back into the chair and look out the window from a more normal perspective. I'm trying to remember everything I know about lightning and lightning research to find evidence that what I have just seen is real and has a solid explanation. I cannot recall a thing about this coronal discharge event or even of anyone who ever mentioned that such things could and did occur. I am aware that coronal discharges during a lightning storm are fairly common on the ground and that following a really close lightning strike, a coronal discharge can happen in the immediate vicinity of where the bolt struck on the ground. In fact, my Mom has a television set which was fried by such a coronal discharge. But in the sky?
I continue to gaze out the window and continue to be amazed. The 747 is now adjacent to the northernmost line of storm clouds to the west and most of the storm activity is clearly behind me. I look forward and can see there are some lights of towns and some appear to be city size so I return to my own seat to settle in for another nap.
When I get back to my seat I see that the storm has either struck up on the starboard side or the plane has been flying a subtle westerly course and the storm is, in fact, behind us now. At any rate I look down and get a chance to see some really pretty electrified cities and towns and spend the next twenty or so minutes pondering what I have just witnessed. Again, trying desparately to remember the pale colors and to be able to exactly describe and draw what I have seen. The stars continue to shine brightly outside the window but I detect an approaching coastline in front of us.
We cross the threshold of land-to-water and I figure I can get a couple hours sleep before we land in Miami. It's now about 4:00 am and we are scheduled to land at 6:30 am. I spread out comfortably on the three seats which are my in-flight bed and drift again into the realm of dreams and visions still stunned and amazed but deeply satisfied at what I have discovered.
thanks for your patience and perserverance. chas
More new items and potential reveries from the past coming soon. For image fans, I've posted some new shots from Seattle below, and, for movie fans I've posted a couple new T&M flicks on the multimedia site <http://homepage.mac.com/credmond/multimedia.html>.
More, as always, later
Chas
The setting sun illuminates the upper reaches of Mt. Rainier as the moon rises.
Image taken from tower looking southeast.
Looking west as the sun recedes behind clouds with the Olympic Mountains dramatically back-lighted.
Taken from tower within seconds of the previous Mt. Rainier image.
The same scene several minutes later. Ferry landing lights and the lights from a tower across the Sound
on the Kitsap peninsula are visible. Taken from the tower.
Current advertisement from Washington Post print edition.
Katherine and I originally purchased this house in 1980
for $110,000. In 2002, after two Metro Red Line stations
(Tenleytown & Friendship Heights) within half-a-mile of us
had been open and operating for about a decade, we
sold the house to Juan Del Real for $411,000. After, as
he puts it, "gutting" and "rebuilding", Juan is selling the
house for $799,000. We estimated he spent about $100K
on the gutting and rebuilding but did keep the original look
of the house - see below.
Ah, the old homestead....................Ah, the new homestead...................I think we made out okay.
And that's today's journal entry. Have a nice weekend, what's left of it, more images from the trip coming as well as more movies.
Chas
Posted: Sat - September 25, 2004 at 08:46 PM
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